In "Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings" characters from an iconic video game wander around recreated buildings built by former Wall Street banking titans. Its disjointed narrative draws equally on the past and mythology, as on science fiction and contemporary culture, while referencing the timeless rise and fall of power structures.

About Jonathan Monaghan

To create his CGI animations, Jonathan Monaghan mines and appropriates the characters and environments from the video games of his youth, as well as incorporating references to art history, Wall Street, consumer products, and other aspects of contemporary culture. “Pitting these ridiculous-looking video game characters and environments with recreations of real, “evil” power is very much what I was doing,” he has said. “By trying to create a coherent reality or a narrative where these absurd manifestations of power interact with actual power structures, my viewers can approach how power works through a different lens.” He likens this process of appropriation and reinterpretation to hacking—pulling images from culture and reversing their meaning, so that they subvert the very structures that produced them.